Pages

Monday, April 1, 2013

Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead

For this
week’s post, I watched Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead by Joe Cross, a documentary about the supposed health benefits
of juice fasts, particularly for people who are morbidly obese or for those who
have health problems that are caused by or associated with obesity.

My first
reaction when I started watching this documentary was to roll my eyes. This may
have a lot to do with all the time I spend studying anorexia nervosa and other
eating disorders, and my resulting skepticism of any sort of health-seeking or
weight-loss endeavors that involves fasting. My gut instinct (ha!) is to write
off any sort of fasting diet as either eating disordered behavior, or as an
ineffective, misinformed way of trying to lose weight that is usually expensive
(not appealing), and is going to result in little more than hunger-induced
irritability and inability to focus (also not appealing), and some major
gastrointestinal distress (definitely not appealing). And when it became clear
about half way into the documentary that there wasn’t going to be any
discussion of what I would consider to be food activism, I almost stopped watching
the documentary completely—it started to feel more like an extended infomercial
for a juicer than a documentary.

But I
decided to finish it, thinking that maybe I’d be able to find something that I
could talk about in relation to food activism. By the end, both Joe and Phil
have completed 60-day fasts, had started eating more healthily and exercising
regularly, had dramatically lessened or eliminated all of the health problems
from which they suffered while obese, lost a ton of weight, and were overall
much happier with their lives. That’s great. Visually, their transformations
were impressive, and in spite of my skepticism regarding juice fasts or any
fasts as effective health-improvement strategies, I couldn’t help but be happy
for them both. But there were also a lot of things that came up in the
documentary that bothered me, and although Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead didn’t
address food activism, I think that there were definitely some common themes between
it and some of the food activism documentaries I’ve watched that I think are
really problematic. For example:

The idea that emotional connections to food are inherently
wrong or dangerous.

Healthy, attractive-looking people telling unhealthy, unattractive-looking
people what to do (how to be healthy) with no other authority than that which
they apparently achieve just by having conventionally (and debatably)
“superior” bodies.

The idea that extreme food/eating practices are the only way
to get results, and that a philosophy of moderation is never effective or
sustainable.

Referring to healthy food as “clean” food or a healthy diet
as “clean eating” or a lifestyle that involves lots of exercise and only
healthy food as a “clean lifestyle.”

On one hand it’s really interesting that all of these themes
keep showing up in media related to food activism and health, because it
highlights the fact that ideas about health, fitness, and healthy food, all of
which seem to be based in objective science, are actually really ties up in
(ever-changing) cultural values and beliefs. Also, harkening back to my
previous post, I think it’s fascinating about how eager people seem to be to
proclaim that they “don’t eat food” or are “fasting” even when they are eating
food, but it’s just a particular type of food that they feel doesn’t count in
some way. Why is that?